Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929. He received his B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University
of Alabama and, in 1955, his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, where he has since taught, and where he has received
both of its college-wide teaching awards. He is currently Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology
of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He is the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, On Human
Nature (1978) and The Ants (1990, with Bert Hölldobler), as well as the recipient of many fellowships,
honors, and awards, including the 1977 National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences (1990), the International Prize for Biology from Japan (1993), and, for his conservation efforts, the
Gold Medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (1990) and the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society (1995).
He is on the Board of Directors of The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and the American Museum
of Natural History, and gives many lectures throughout the world. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with his
wife, Irene.
Review
"A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them."
--The Wall Street Journal
"An original work of synthesis...a program of unrivalled ambition: to unify all the major branches of knowledge--sociology,
economics, the arts and religion--under the banner of science."
--The New York Times
"As elegant in its prose as it is rich in its ideas...a book of immense importance."
--Atlanta Journal & Constitution
"Edward O. Wilson is a hero. . . he has made landmark scientific discoveries and has a writing style to
die for. . . . A complex and nuanced argument."
--Boston Globe
"One of the clearest and most dedicated popularizers of science since T. H. Huxley ...Mr. Wilson can do
the science and the prose."
--Time
"An excellent book. Wilson provides superb overviews of Western intellectual history and the current state
of understanding in many academic disciplines."
--Slate
"The Renaissance scholar still lives.... A sensitive, wide-ranging mind discoursing beautifully.... Wilson's
buoyant intellectual courage is bracing."
--Seattle Weekly
Random House, Incorporated
March, 2000
Summary
An enormous intellectual adventure. In this groundbreaking new book, the American biologist Edward O. Wilson,
considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge
and the need to search for consilience--the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small
number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning. Professor
Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, now once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking.
He shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in
the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos and the human species--a vision that
found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization
of knowledge in the last two centuries. Drawing on the physical sciences and biology, anthropology, psychology,
religion, philosophy, and the arts, Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging
back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship, and how they
are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world as it most profoundly, elegantly, and excitingly
is.
Excerpt
chapter 1
The Ionian Enchantment
I remember very well the time I was captured by the dream of unified learning. It was in the early fall of 1947,
when at eighteen I came up from Mobile to Tuscaloosa to enter my sophomore year at the University of Alabama. A
beginning biologist, fired by adolescent enthusiasm but short on theory and vision, I had schooled myself in natural
history with field guides carried in a satchel during solitary excursions into the woodlands and along the freshwater
streams of my native state. I saw science, by which I meant (and in my heart I still mean) the study of ants, frogs,
and snakes, as a wonderful way to stay outdoors.
My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological
classification. The Linnaean system is deceptively easy. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals
into species. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. Examples of such groups are
all the crows and all the oaks. Next you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus
for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genus--all the species of crows--and ossifragus for the fish crow
in particular. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into
orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdoms--plants, animals, fungi, protists,
monerans, and archaea. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons
into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. It is, in other
words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old.
I had reached the level of the Carolus Linnaeus of 1735 or, more accurately (since at that time I knew little of
the Swedish master), the Roger Tory Peterson of 1934, when the great naturalist published the first edition of
A Field Guide to the Birds. My Linnaean period was nonetheless a good start for a scientific career. The first
step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.
Then I discovered evolution. Suddenly--that is not too strong a word--I saw the world in a wholly new way. This
epiphany I owed to my mentor Ralph Chermock, an intense, chain-smoking young assistant professor newly arrived
in the provinces with a Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University. After listening to me natter for a while about
my lofty goal of classifying all the ants of Alabama, he handed me a copy of Ernst Mayr's 1942 Systematics and
the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you want to become a real biologist.
The thin volume in the plain blue cover was one of the New Synthesis works, uniting the nineteenth-century Darwinian
theory of evolution and modern genetics. By giving a theoretical structure to natural history, it vastly expanded
the Linnaean enterprise. A tumbler fell somewhere in my mind, and a door opened to a new world. I was enthralled,
couldn't stop thinking about the implications evolution has for classification and for the rest of biology. And
for philosophy. And for just about everything. Static pattern slid into fluid process. My thoughts, embryonically
those of a modern biologist, traveled along a chain of causal events, from mutations that alter genes to evolution
that multiplies species, to species that assemble into faunas and floras. Scale expanded, and turned continuous.
By inwardly manipulating time and space, I found I could climb the steps in biological organization from microscopic
particles in cells to the forests that clothe mountain slopes. A new enthusiasm surged through me. The animals
and plants I loved so dearly reentered the stage as lead players in a grand drama. Natural history was validated
as a real science.
I had experienced the Ionian Enchantment. That recently coined expression I borrow from the physicist and historian
Gerald Holton. It means a belief in the unity of the sciences--a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition,
that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws. Its roots go back to Thales of
Miletus, in Ionia, in the sixth century b.c. The legendary philosopher was considered by Aristotle two centuries
later to be the founder of the physical sciences. He is of course remembered more concretely for his belief that
all matter consists ultimately of water. Although the notion is often cited as an example of how far astray early
Greek speculation could wander, its real significance is the metaphysics it expressed about the material basis
of the world and the unity of nature.
The Enchantment, growing steadily more sophisticated, has dominated scientific thought ever since. In modern physics
its focus has been the unification of all the forces of nature--electroweak, strong, and gravitation--the hoped-for
consolidation of theory so tight as to turn the science into a "perfect" system of thought, which by
sheer weight of evidence and logic is made resistant to revision. But the spell of the Enchantment extends to other
fields of science as well, and in the minds of a few it reaches beyond into the social sciences, and still further,
as I will explain later, to touch the humanities. The idea of the unity of science is not idle. It has been tested
in acid baths of experiment and logic and enjoyed repeated vindication. It has suffered no decisive defeats. At
least not yet, even though at its center, by the very nature of the scientific method, it must be thought always
vulnerable. On this weakness I will also expand in due course.
Einstein, the architect of grand unification in physics, was Ionian to the core. That vision was perhaps his greatest
strength. In an early letter to his friend Marcel Grossmann he said, "It is a wonderful feeling to recognize
the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things." He was
referring to his successful alignment of the microscopic physics of capillaries with the macroscopic, universe-wide
physics of gravity. In later life he aimed to weld everything else into a single parsimonious system, space with
time and motion, gravity with electromagnetism and cosmology. He approached but never captured that grail. All
scientists, Einstein not excepted, are children of Tantalus, frustrated by the failure to grasp that which seems
within reach. They are typified by those thermodynamicists who for decades have drawn ever closer to the temperature
of absolute zero, when atoms cease all motion. In 1995, pushing down to within a few billionths of a degree above
absolute zero, they created a Bose-Einstein condensate, a fundamental form of matter beyond the familiar gases,
liquids, and solids, in which many atoms act as a single atom in one quantum
state. As temperature drops and pressure is increased, a gas condenses into a liquid, then a solid; then appears
the Bose-Einstein condensate. But absolute, entirely absolute zero, a temperature that exists in imagination, has
still not been attained.
On a far more modest scale, I found it a wonderful feeling not just to taste the unification metaphysics but also
to be released from the confinement of fundamentalist religion. I had been raised a Southern Baptist, laid backward
under the water on the sturdy arm of a pastor, been born again. I knew the healing power of redemption. Faith,
hope, and charity were in my bones, and with millions of others I knew that my savior Jesus Christ would grant
me eternal life. More pious than the average teenager, I read the Bible cover to cover, twice. But now at college,
steroid-driven into moods of adolescent rebellion, I chose to doubt. I found it hard to accept that our deepest
beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago.
I suffered cognitive dissonance between the cheerfully reported genocidal wars of these people and Christian civilization
in 1940s Alabama. It seemed to me that the Book of Revelation might be black magic hallucinated by an ancient primitive.
And I thought, surely a loving personal God, if He is paying attention, will not abandon those who reject the literal
interpretation of the biblical cosmology. It is only fair to award points for intellectual courage. Better damned
with Plato and Bacon, Shelley said, than go to heaven with Paley and Malthus. But most of all, Baptist theology
made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it
be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? Might the pastors of my childhood, good and loving men
though they were, be mistaken? It was all too much, and freedom was ever so sweet. I drifted away from the church,
not definitively agnostic or atheistic, just Baptist no more.
Still, I had no desire to purge religious feelings. They were bred in me; they suffused the wellsprings of my creative
life. I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have
a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more
than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy
Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps
science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science
is religion liberated and writ large.
Such, I believe, is the source of the Ionian Enchantment: Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation
is another way of satisfying religious hunger. It is an endeavor almost as old as civilization and intertwined
with traditional religion, but it follows a very different course--a stoic's creed, an acquired taste, a guidebook
to adventure plotted across rough terrain. It aims to save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the
human mind. Its central tenet, as Einstein knew, is the unification of knowledge. When we have unified enough certain
knowledge, we will understand who we are and why we are here.
If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative
of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.
The ancient Greeks expressed the idea in a myth of vaulting ambition. Daedalus escapes from Crete with his son
Icarus on wings he has fashioned from feathers and wax. Ignoring the warnings of his father, Icarus flies toward
the sun, whereupon his wings come apart and he falls into the sea. That is the end of Icarus in the myth. But we
are left to wonder: Was
he just a foolish boy? Did he pay the price for hubris, for pride in sight of the gods? I like to think that on
the contrary his daring represents a saving human grace. And so the great astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
could pay tribute to the spirit of his mentor, Sir Arthur Eddington, by saying: Let us see how high we can fly
before the sun melts the wax in our wings.